Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> European - Italian

This study offers a sustained examination of the presentation of eastern Asia, the Middle East, and northern Africa in two of the most important chivalric epics of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Matteo Maria Boiardo s Orlando Innamorato (1495) and Ludovico Ariosto s Orlando Furioso (1516). Comparing the narratological strategies used to depict non-European characters in these stories, Jo Ann Cavallo argues that Boiardo s cosmopolitan vision of humankind increasingly became replaced by Ariosto s crusading ideology, which emphasized a binary opposition between...

The theatre of the Italian Renaissance was directly inspired by the classical stage of Greece and Rome, and many have argued that the former imitated the latter without developing a new theatre tradition. In this book, Salvatore DiMaria investigates aspects of innovation that made Italian Renaissance stage a modern, original theatre in its own right. He provides important evidence for creative imitation at work by comparing sources and imitations - incuding Machiavelli's Mandragola and Clizia, Cecchi's Assiuolo, Groto's Emilia, and Dolce's Marianna...

In this detailed treatment of the myth of Adonis in post-Classical times, Carlo Caruso provides an overview of the main texts, both literary and scholarly, in Latin and in the vernacular, which secured for the Adonis myth a unique place in the Early Modern revival of Classical mythology. While aiming to provide this general outline of the myth's fortunes in the Early Modern age, the book also addresses three points of primary interest, on which most of the original research included in the work has been conducted. First, the myth's earliest significant revival in the age of Italian...

The Italian fascists under Benito Mussolini appropriated many aspects of the country's Catholic religious heritage to exploit the mystique and power of the sacred. One concept that the regime deployed as a core strategy was that of "sacrifice." In this book, Chiara Ferrari interrogates how the rhetoric of sacrifice was used by the Italian fascist regime throughout the interwar years to support its totalitarian project and its vision of an all-encompassing bond between the people and the state.

The Rhetoric of Violence and Sacrifice in Fascist Italy focuses on speeches by...

At several junctures in his career, Dante paused to consider what it meant to be a writer. The questions he posed were both simple and wide-ranging: How does language, in particular 'poetic language, ' work? Can poetry be translated? What is the relationship between a text and its commentary? Who controls the meaning of a literary work? In Dante and Augustine, Simone Marchesi re-examines these questions in light of the influence that Augustine's reflections on similar issues exerted on Dante's sense of his task as a poet.

Examining Dante's life-long dialogue with...

Nobel Prize-winning dramatist Luigi Pirandello is known worldwide for his innovative, complex plays. In Pirandello's Theatre of Living Masks, Umberto Mariani and Alice Gladstone Mariani offer the first new edition in nearly sixty years of six of his major works - Liola, It Is So If You Think So, Six Characters in Search of an Author, Henry IV, Each in His Own Way, and The Mountain Giants.

Mariani and Mariani's translations of these texts are both vibrant and faithful to the originals, using contemporary expressions and...

During the Counter-Reformation, inquisition manual authors working in Italian lands adapted the Catholic Church's traditional tactics of inquisitorial procedure, which had been formulated in the medieval period, to the prosecution of philo-Protestants. Through a comparison of the texts of four such authors to contemporary inquisition processes, Jane K. Wickersham situates the Roman inquisition's prosecution of philo-Protestants within the larger framework of the complex religious upheavals of the sixteenth century.

Identifying the critical role played by ritual practice in...

Italy's original fascination with its cultural origins in Greece and Rome first created what is now known as 'the Classical tradition' - the pervasive influence of ancient art and thought on later times. In response to a growing interest in Classical reception, this volume provides a timely reappraisal of the Greek and Roman legacies in Italian literary history. There are fresh insights on the early study of Greek and Latin texts in post-classical Italy and reassessments of the significance attached to ancient authors and ideas in the Renaissance, as well as some innovative interpretations...